B. U. G. S.

I hate math, but I had to be good at the most advanced kind of calculus and other areas I cannot even remember the name of now. Someone who loves math for its own sake is a puzzle-solver. I am NOT a puzzle-solver. I am entirely creative. I figure out questions to ask and their answers.

I finally did get by in math when I realized what we were trying to find out. Which leads us back to the same old problem: math professors are provincials. So a professor goes to the blackboard and starts telling us that, if we assume that b is so and so then a is so and so, and then he proceeds to make all this into an equation. I could learn it if he began with what the point of all this was:

“This year we will produce ten million brick for sale. How many will we produce next year? Let’s list the things we have to take into account: population increase, increase or decrease in per capita income, preference for brick houses, and so on and on.”

“We are going to have to put this in short order. We can’t discuss each ofhtese factors separately because some of them are interrelated.

Here is hte mathematical term for those are interrelated (I don’t have that little curlecue on this computer).

So instead of saying population increase, increase or decrease in per capita income, preference for brick houses, and so on and on” we can get them all in one place if we iuse a code-letter for each of them, that is we say next year’s brick production is bp and we say that bp is related to population change, percapita income change which we put in as pc, and so on…”

To a new mathematics student, this could get very interesting. He is showing how to get all that crap on one page.

Once he begins, he begins to show, in concree (excuse the pun) terms how this language works. He would show how rodays percapita income is related to tomorrow’s population in ways it would take a book to spell out, and then show how the same thing can be said onthe same page in mathspeak.

I don’t know about anyone else, b ut I conly got higher math when I finally realized the question was, “What is this moron trying to SAY?”

My doctor brother IS a puzzle-solver. He enjoys this stuff. He is probably in the one percent of readers of medical journals who actually check the statitistics and the graphs and the equations in an article with the conclusions drawn from them. In every journal he says, there is at least one case where the statistics or the equations were misstated in the text. He has long since ceased to write authors or editors about this. They don’t like math either.

The point is, math is NOT a substitute for routine logic, it is a way of putting complicated logic into usable form, or it is pointless. In fact, math is used by most “intelletuals” in EXACTLY teh same way untranslated French was used until recently, or Latin was used in the Middle Ages. It is a “Keep Out” sign for those who aren’t getting paid to do this:

“No Amateurs Allowed.”

If I had a board full of advanced equations, I could tell you, in English, what it said. I wonder how many people who use equations in journals could do that?